As the United States struggles to deal with the tragedy of the terrorist strikes Tuesday morning, the state of heightened security may affect the PC industry's ability to do business.

Airplane flights over the continental U.S. will remain grounded at least until Wednesday morning, meaning that passengers and cargo alike will not arrive at their destinations on time. That may have an impact on the PC supply chain as it ramps up into the holiday season.

Two hijacked airliners crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center Tuesday morning, and a third crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth plane also crashed outside of Pittsburgh, although investigators said late Tuesday that that plane may not have been hijacked.

The issue is not the shipment of finished PCs, but the ability of dozens of component suppliers to ship motherboards, hard drives, capacitors, and other items around the world for PC manufacturing, especially by airplane. The East Coast tragedy not only destroyed a significant economic hub in the World Trade Center, but also comes as the PC industry begins buying components in anticipation of the holiday buying season. The practice of just-in-time manufacturing used by PC OEMs to reduce cost means that any gap in component supply can leave OEMs with unfinished products.

National Semiconductor, along with one motherboard maker, has already been affected by the ban on air travel. Intel Corp. said it was evaluating the situation.

According to a spokesman for the U.S. Customs Office in Long Beach, Calif., the U.S. borders remain open for imported goods. "We are, however, in our highest state of alert, security code level 1," said the Customs spokesman. "Cargo is being intensely scrutinized."

KGO-TV in the San Francisco Bay Area also reported that seafaring cargo ships were receiving escorts from U.S. Coast Guard cutters.

"It really doesn't affect it that much," said Matt Sargent, an analyst for ARS Research in La Jolla, Calif., of the flight restrictions. "The bigger picture down the road is the increased security on trade, especially with notebook production being handled in Taiwan or China."

For now, PC OEMs said they felt confident that their businesses wouldn't be affected. Like the rest of the nation, however, they must wait for the government's decision on how and how long U.S. air travel will be affected.

"It's still too early to tell, but at this point, it appears to be a blip," said a spokesman for Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Tex. "At this point, we are able to service our operations with our existing (component) supply," at least in the short term, he said.

Likewise, a spokesman for Gateway Inc. in San Diego said the company had a sufficient supply for now. "At this time we're still trying to figure out what's going on, what the impact is going to be," he said. "If the flight situation continues for a long period of time it could be an issue, but for now, we're OK."

A source close to Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto, Calif. said the company had sent around an internal memo requesting that employees work from home for the remainder of Tuesday. The company expressed confidence in its ability to do business, and said that it had successfully assisted employees out of its New York City and Washington D.C. offices.

Representatives from major PC OEMs said they believed that most of their components were shipped overseas by boat. However, an executive at motherboard maker Tyan Computer in Fremont, Calif., said that wasn't true.

"It comes by air through San Francisco," he said. "We're day-to-day right now, and cut off for the next day or two. Hopefully then things will return to normal at the end of the week. To put things in perspective right now, there are more important things in life."

"We're entering into the high season right now," Clegg added. "There's not really an excess of finished goods. We're OK, but not sitting on excess capacity by any means. We want the shipments to continue."

A spokesman for National Semiconductor, which manufactures I/O chips for PCs plus a large variety of mixed components, independently decided to ban air shipments of its components, essentially shutting down the company. The spokesman said the delay was "indefinite".

"It wouldn't matter, since there's they're banning air travel anyway," the National spokesman said. The chipmaker also ships finished semiconductor wafers overseas to Malaysia by air for packaging.

Analyst Martin Reynolds of Gartner Inc.'s Dataquest research group estimated that the ban would affect shipments "by a couple of days". "Short term, it will delay shipments by a couple of days, but the difference will soon be made up," Reynolds wrote in an email to ExtremeTech.

At Intel Corp., company officials were still evaluating the situation. A company spokesman for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Intel's worldwide offices were being put on a heightened state of alert, but that it was "too early to tell" if the air travel ban would affect its business.

Representatives from each company interviewed by ExtremeTech expressed concern and sorrow for those caught in the crashes and the subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center towers. A spokesman for hard disk drive supplier Seagate Technology Inc., Scotts Valley, Calif., declined to comment on the business aspects of the terrorist attacks.

"We've been thinking more about the tragedy and ensuring that Seagate employees are safe rather than worrying about if shipments are going out," he said. "We have logistics people working on it once things get moving again they'll get shipments out to customers. We're confident they can handle it."

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